It’s important to know that for me, choreography is not just . . . steps. The gig goes way beyond simply blocking out a routine to include developing a story, a narrative, a vision, and then creatively directing the piece to bring it into fruition. A lot of “whats” need to be addressed before anyone steps out onto the floor, because I’ve always felt that if you didn’t take care of the big-picture concerns beforehand, a routine could come off as shallow and uninteresting. What is the music saying? How should this dance make me feel? What is the essential dynamic here between the man and woman? What kind of conversation am I having with the audience, with the couple, and with those judgmental ghost armies of ballroom tradition?
Dance tells a story. Right there is the root of choreography for me, because even if the piece has very basic parameters, even if it is, say, comparable to an action movie with a shallow plot, it still has to have some sort of narrative. Not every routine is complex, just like not every novel is War and Peace. Although much depends on the song as well, the story forms a true basis of the action. The algorithm tends to be music, story, dance, in that order, or perhaps music + story = dance.
When I perform, my recognized strength has been spontaneity within the moment. The grace notes that I’ve added made the dance special, movements and rhythms that were unplanned and unchoreographed. Committed to paper, using an ordinary form of dance notation, the piece may have looked just okay. It’s the way I perform within the moment that lifts a routine out of the ordinary, simply because I add different layers to it as I go.
Imagine a choreographer, such as Kenny Ortega of Dirty Dancing, writing down on paper a routine as mere dance steps, using those comical shoe outlines and dotted lines indicating direction. Scribbles on a piece of paper can’t sum up what happens in the movie when Baby and Johnny Castle dance. Notation is a two-dimensional description of a three-dimensional reality, or maybe four dimensional, since the dancers are not just passing through space, up and down, forward and back, side to side, but moving in time also.
I’d like to take you through the whole process, then provide an example from my season with Elizabeth that shows how it all plays out.
“The name of the piece is . . .” I really do tend to start on that very basic level, and usually the routine simply takes on the name of the song, because the music inspires the dance. When I’m in conversation with the producers, their vision becomes obvious—let’s say, in this case, they want a dance that is like a movie, a high-energy, buttered-popcorn, in-your-face dance extravaganza.
My initial conception might have been different. With the addition of the producers’ input I would have to adjust my vision, no longer thinking in terms of a Woody Allen character piece, say, but now something like Fast and the Furious 10 on the dance floor. I choreograph for different environments, different moods, and different strengths. Let’s say the chosen music is an uplifting pop song then currently on the charts, featuring an EDM type of sound—meaning “electronic dance music,” with lots of synthesizers and programmed drum beats.
Listening to the music, I would feel the pressure of the song’s hype, the artificial inflation that takes place because everyone in the audience knows the tune. A popular song can quickly turn from novelty into habit, and habit can be deadening. But the music is still super sexy and super strong and there is a very solid male-female interaction running through the lyrics.
A cha-cha, I decide. A treatment begins to form in my mind, the story that I would write with this dance. At first I reference only fabric textures, different colors, the kind of dresses I envision for the girl.
“I want beaded fringe,” I say, almost in a trance, like some poet making a connection with his muse. “Pearl gray, no frills.”
Next a sense of dim, moody lighting comes to mind. “I want solo spots”—tightly focused spotlights on individual performers—“a very intimate feel in the beginning. I’ll probably want a spot on her, and as she moves back, she reveals him. So he’ll be in the foreground and is only revealed as the camera pulls back.”
The difficult thing is transitioning between theatrical, competitive, and television routines. Choreographing for television is far different from choreographing for theater, which in turn is very different from choreographing for competition. In competition, we always have a standard, prerehearsed routine worked out in advance, but we never know what song the DJ is going to play. Every round, we are forced to customize our routine on the fly to match the music.
Because I studied the violin, I have a basic understanding of quarter beats, whole notes, bars, crescendos. Those formative years working out on the keyboard at Odessa Music Academy allowed me a general sense of how musicality operates within the context of a song. All that comes into play as I chart the ways the music can intersect with story and be transformed into dance.
As the pop song plays, I count out the beats in my head and watch the dance come together in my mind.
Cha-cha-cha, two three, cha-cha-cha, two three. Four-and-one, two three. Four-and-one . . .
I listen to the rhythm of the song. Where is the “four-and-one”? If there is no “four-and-one” beat, complemented by percussion instruments, the dance loses the essence of cha-cha. Each style of dance summons up different visions. Tango needs instrumentation that speaks of Argentinean dance halls, whispering of silvery passion and red fire. This cha-cha will be as sexy as a tango, I decide. A tango is . . . what? A man reaching out to a woman.
A plea.
A proposal.
A proposal of marriage—that is enough of a hook for me to hang my story on.
I settle on dim lighting throughout the routine, because nobody wants to have sex in Times Square. A dancer might kick and jive in the bright lights of Times Square, but for a man to propose to a woman requires a more intimate setting. Drama, mood, the environment, the genre—all of it comes together in my mind within the swirl of music.
After I choose the style, set the scene, imagine the costuming, come up with the narrative, consider camera angles, and decide on the lighting, then and only then do I go back and start putting steps to the piece. I try to freestyle it before I settle on the precise moves, so at least some spontaneous elements can crop up.
“That works,” I say to myself. “Let’s keep that.”
When I choreograph, I paint with movement. I have a vision for what kind of dance I want, and the more I think the piece through, the more I start to see it in terms of actual pictures. The magic is seeing what’s in my head coming to life on the dance floor.
Once I have the vision of the piece solidly in my mind, I bring in a rehearsal dancer, and of course she can be inspired in ways I might not have imagined. But I have painted the picture in my mind, and now I want to see what I was painting, so I have to direct her movement.
“No” is the strongest word I use when guiding my partner. More often it’s “Yes, yes, I love that.”
My preparation involves dancing the guy’s part myself, choreographing it with the rehearsal partner, then moving on to the girl part so I can teach it to whoever would dance the part on the show. Learning the girl part is like stepping through the looking glass, where every day is Opposite Day. By the time I need to teach the piece, I already have it firmly in place.
Even though the word “choreography” means “written notation of dancing,” I never write down specific dance steps. My notations run along grander, more general lines: “I want her to be fierce and contained, then rise like a phoenix, reborn out of the fire.”
Next, we head into the studio and I just dance to the music. When I dance, I see the routine come together in my mind. I want the dance to satisfy the mood, satisfy the musicality, satisfy the story. Once I am happy with the way it feels, with the flow of it, and with how we marry the music with the movement, my normal thought is “I can’t wait to perform it!” or “I can’t wait to teach it!”
After painting the description and blocking out the moves, I have to hand the piece over to the
producers to make the routine happen. I feel like a mom giving up her new baby to the hospital nurses. I will usually follow along the production process, attending the costume fittings to make sure everything is being done right, and check in with the other departments, too, the sound and lighting techs, the director, even the camera operators. When choreographing for television, I’d be an idiot not to be mindful about camera angles.
Television places your balls in a vise, compressing the creative process to an almost unimaginable degree. Whether it is on Dancing with the Stars or any of the other dance programs on TV, no one is given weeks to create a routine. I usually have two days, or five days at most. Process falls by the wayside. Trial and error became a matter of more error than trial, and results are judged on deadline.
In the heat of creativity, I can’t very well ask the few dozen people on a production crew for more time. Would you all please stand by and wait while I get ready for inspiration to strike? No, I have to be ready.
I choreograph the piece, then teach it to my partner, or whoever is going to perform it on the show. At that point, the dance exits the realm of creation and enters the territory of collaboration. Unless I am dancing a solo piece that I choreograph myself, dance is always a team effort, an act of cooperation and connection.
Originality is a difficult standard, because I am constantly influenced by other people’s work, ideas, or just their general vibe. Originality in artists comes from their own integrity, their own strength of character. I respect the concept of sampling from its use in hip-hop, and I think it’s important to be open to inspiration and influence.
But I also always feel compelled to add something of myself, even if the spark comes from the outside. It can be awesome to dress up who I am with other people’s influences. But at some point, the dance has to be me. I have to make it my own.
Over the years, I’ve pitched a million ideas to the Dancing with the Stars producers, encouraging them to push the envelope. In one of my early seasons I wanted to try a spoken word piece that I wrote, professing my love to a woman. The camera would then pull out and reveal I was talking about my partner. Let me be charitable and say the idea didn’t immediately grab the Dancing with the Stars producers.
The show had a million ways to say no to me, and rightfully so. But for the first time, in that season with Elizabeth, the producers approved one of my wild production ideas for a number. As a child of the 1990s, I was more interested in Elizabeth’s Saved by the Bell past than her Showgirls past. I came up with the idea of a routine based on one of the sitcom’s most memorable episodes.
Saved by the Bell was usually strictly middle of the road and light as a feather, but occasionally it would address weighty issues of the day. One plot thread indirectly dealt with drug abuse, showing Elizabeth’s overachiever character, Jessie, taking “coffee pills” to stay awake in order to study.
One of the most famous scenes in Saved by the Bell had Jessie dozing off after a caffeine-fueled homework binge. Zack Morris popped through the window—it was a second-floor window, so who was he, Tarzan?—saying, “Hey, Jessie.”
She woke up and freaked. “Oh my God—no, no, no!”
She grabbed the pills and started gobbling them down, behaving like a madwoman.
“Wait, wait, what are you doing?” Zack asked.
“I need the pills! I need some pills to stay awake for the dance.”
He was there to tell her that she had already overslept and missed the dance.
“I’m so excited, I’m so excited,” she repeated frantically.
Zack grabbed her and held her. “Jessie,” he said.
“I’m so scared,” Jessie whispered, and then started crying.
The coffee pills episode wasn’t exactly a 60 Minutes exposé on drug use, but it represented a big moment on Saved by the Bell. People talked about it—for a brief second it was a thing, a cutting edge TV moment.
Dancing with the Stars liked to do “Most Memorable Year” theme nights, and for Elizabeth they chose 1990, when her sitcom star was at its brightest. The producers re-created the whole Saved by the Bell set.
In the live performance, I played the Zack Morris character, jumping into the scene out of nowhere. Not little Potsie on Happy Days anymore!
“Hey, what are you doing? We’ve got to go jive!”
“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said, in character as Jessie Spano. “I need my jive pills.”
“Whoa, you don’t need any jive pills!”
“I need my jive pills. I’m so excited, I’m so excited—I’m so scared.”
I tossed her pills away and bam! The song “I’m So Excited” came on and we exploded into the jive number. This wasn’t by any means the gorgeous Mandy Moore–choreographed opening sequence of La La Land, or Kenny Ortega’s classic Dirty Dancing numbers. But it was a great moment for Dancing with the Stars, because the show brought back a famous, really special TV moment. And it was a great moment for me, too—reliving my nine-year-old self, sitting on a couch at home on West Street and Avenue Z in Brooklyn, watching Saved by the Bell, then years later being on live television re-creating a scene with a girl of my adolescent dreams.
THE SEASON AFTER I PARTNERED WITH ELIZABETH WAS, AS they say, déjà vu all over again. Someone had inadvertently pushed the repeat button. This time I went into the first meeting with my new partner to find yet another female icon from my youth. Danica McKellar had played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, and was etched in my mind the same way Elizabeth had been, with a way-back sitcom laser.
But the journey we took on the show during Season 18 was entirely different. Danica hadn’t wasted time sulking over the adult difficulties of a former child star, but instead had developed into a real brainiac, an author, an education advocate, and a champion of getting young girls involved in math and science.
I was having self-esteem problems of my own. Well, not really, I never have self-esteem problems, but I did have an internal struggle. I knew I was really putting in the effort on Dancing with the Stars, but I had never been able to grab a Mirrorball Trophy. What was going on? What was I doing wrong? Now matched with Danica, I was in my sixth season. With previous partners I had placed eleventh, tenth, third, and second, and in the previous season with Elizabeth had come in sixth.
I struggled to validate my presence on the show. All this effort was meaningless without at least one first-place finish, just one, just to say I was able to do it all the way to the end. I wanted a championship year, creating such an incredible platform for my partner that we stole the show and took the season. The choices that I made on her behalf would finally prove good enough for me to give my partner a Dancing with the Stars trophy. If I couldn’t do that, what was I doing?
I began to ask myself a fundamental question. Was it better to have a partner who knew how to dance, or one who had never stood on a dance floor? Both options represented a challenge.
If my partner could dance, there existed the challenge of living up to her potential. She could dance, the audience knew she could dance, but she had to show me her growth. Being on Dancing with the Stars wasn’t like creating a music video. It wasn’t a single little performance. It was a three-month journey, for lack of a better word. In order to make it work, my partner had to not just show up, but also to learn the material and execute—show up, fall in love with the steps, become comfortable with me as her partner. Essentially, I had to make her fall in love, so that she knew to trust me. The process involved opening herself up, emerging out of herself into a new reality. Otherwise, she shouldn’t take the plunge to begin with.
To me as a choreographer, the challenge with an accomplished dancer was to develop routines that would test her. With a dance veteran like Elizabeth Berkley, who was excited to be on the show, who had the eyes of countless people on her, how could I raise the bar high enough? My task was to make this the most incredible experience my partner would ever have.
Was that too ambitious? Perhaps, but it was always what I
was going for. My approach encompassed the whole package: her as an athlete, her as a human being, and her as a dancer. I wanted to see her change physically and emotionally, her train of thought, inspiration, feeling, how she saw the world. I wanted her to end up with a whole new aura around her.
Becoming a better dancer was only number three in the formula, at least in terms of what inspired me when I walked into the studio. If my partner already had dance experience, yes, of course that made my life much easier. But dance was still only third in line among my priorities as a coach and mentor, behind athletic qualities and human character. So having dance experience helped, but it wasn’t the main concern.
With a person such as Danica, who hadn’t danced much before, the challenge was simpler. Everyone loves an underdog story. But just because I was teaching her dance at a more basic level didn’t make the other elements in the formula go away. I still wanted to challenge her as an athlete and as a human being. That, for me, was what the Dancing with the Stars trophy measures. How much have I helped this individual develop in the last three months? How much has she grown?
I’ve learned a startling lesson on the show. Audience members have displayed an uncanny ability to recognize personal growth on the part of the contestants. I didn’t believe it at first, but the results have proved it to be true season after season, year after year. It’s a little odd, but the voters don’t necessarily reward the best dancer. They have tended to support the person who has grown most significantly over the course of the season. That fact has reinforced my faith in my fellow human beings. It turned out that many people felt as I did, that what was important in life, finally, was not the glitz and glamour and the flashy step, but growth.
I’ve read surveys about what children enjoy most about participating in sports. Surprisingly, winning doesn’t even make the top five. Number one? Getting better at the skills involved. In other words, growth. That is what makes people happiest, not only children but adults, too, the sense of achieving, improving, growing. That also happens to be the quality that most impresses the audience watching Dancing with the Stars.
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